My understanding is that it's inaccurate enough to potentially affect the run. If nothing else, I recall seeing something about wall clipping around Gold & Silver that doesn't happen on hardware, but it's been far too long to remember specifics.
More recent versions of PCSX2 general gameplay is somewhat faster than real hardware, doesn't reflect game lag properly, and is routinely modified. Also, since there are so very many builds of PCSX2 and no real way to tell builds apart from a verification/moderator standpoint it no longer made sense to allow emulated runs.
Wanted to re-open the discussion on this thread; I understand why emulators are banned from the main leaderboards, but I think it would still be nice to have somewhere to submit runs done on emulator. Could there be a way to maybe make a category extensions leaderboard for emulator? That way it wouldn't clutter up the main board or compete with hardware runs, while still being a record of times that people have done on emulator.
Just a thought!
The notion of adding "emulator" boards is unworkable entirely. For one thing, we're already at 18 categories... we'd be doubling that to 36. Plus the game has the extremely unfortunate habit of attracting cheats and frauds so qualifying legitimate gameplay is far more detail intense than real hardware.
HAVING SAID THAT... since the day I had to remove emulator from this game I have been trying to think of some way to balance competition between the two and make it somehow workable so that all efforts can be represented on the existing leaderboards.
The first issue is that a great amount of testing would have to be done on testing many versions of the existing emulators to see which builds are closest to emulating God Hand accurately. After that, at bare minimum, emulator runs would have to include a handcam where the hands are visible at all time as many splicers and people trying to pass TAS as real gameplay through speedrunning history have been exposed due to this. Further thought still needs to be put into this before doing anything.
Final note, I see no evidence that you've done any runs or that you intend to do any runs, and more often than not moderators field many requests that lead to absolutely nothing... so if someone wants to advocate for this further it would be preferable if they had a vested interest and something to show for it.
I've done 3 full runs on stream using an emulator, and my PB is currently 2:32:07 in Easy NG standard. It was several months ago and I didn't save the vod (since I knew it wasn't submittable), but I plan on running it again, especially if I do have somewhere to submit it. I've done 3 full runs of it on stream; it may not be the main game I speedrun but I definitely have interest in running the game, and would run it more if I could submit the runs somewhere. But thanks for assuming I'm just asking this for no reason.
Also, I specifically suggested adding emulator to a category extensions board, since that would not share any space with the main leaderboard.
As an example of what I'm suggesting, the other game I run frequently, Peggle, has this set up on its SRC.com page (I don't know how the moderators there set it up, but many games have it), where the category extensions page is completely separate from the main boards.
Other games such as Super Mario Odyssey also have this, where if you go to the Super Mario Odyssey page, and at the top (right below the game thumbnail and title) click on "Leaderboards", you have the option of looking at all the default categories on the main page, or being taken to the "Category Extensions" leaderboard. For games like SM Odyssey it's mainly used for meme categories, but I see no reason why it couldn't serve as an alternate leaderboard for emulator runs of God Hand. It wouldn't even be lumped in with the main leaderboard when listed for people's SRC.com profiles (it would be listed under "God Hand Category Extensions"), so it's would be very clear that it's not a hardware run.
I love playing and speedrunning God Hand, so I'm just looking for any way that it could have wider reach.
Category extensions is a rubbish idea for a game that has fewer runners than categories. If this is going to happen it is going to be in one unified leaderboard without a category split. Trouble is that some groundwork needs to be done on which versions of what emulators are acceptable... and that'll have to wait until I can get around to it. You'll just have to be patient.
It has come to my attention that God Hand can still be bought on the Playstation Store via the PS3. That version is viable for runs and it's only $9.99 last I knew (I can't see the price because I already own it).
Bang kenapa ga ada platform emulator PS2 bang kalo ada Kami speedrun dari Indonesia banyak yang ingin bersaing di game God Hand ini dan agar makin di kenal
Look, people... the game is available officially for cheap to anyone with a PS3. This is an extremely high effort game and if you don't care enough to purchase it then you won't care enough to get any good at it. I honestly don't understand why speedrunning uniquely is a realm where everyone expects everyone to be absolutely okay with and support piracy. But most importantly for the point of leaderboards even attempting to include PS2 emulators doesn't make sense. None of them are accurate and new versions and builds are happening all the time, that would force me to do extensive testing on EVERY, VERSION, RELEASED to make sure which ones are and are not acceptable. What's more is that I regularly run into footage of faked gameplay via emulators, YouTube is full of that shit. OR MAYBE I could expect someone to give a damn enough to get the game legally.
If a point ever comes where PS2 emulation is worth a damn or the game becomes otherwise to obtain, then I'll revisit this but until then the answer will stay the same - emulator runs are not acceptable for God Hand.
